Seafaring: an early
medieval conference on the islands of the North Atlantic - November 3-5, 2016
Hi ITM readers.
With Donna Beth Ellard (University of Denver) and Tiffany Beechy (University of Colorado Boulder), I’ve been planning a conference for next November that we hope will grab the attention of the ITM readership: http://www.du.edu/ahss/english/news-events/seafaring-conference.html
Designed less around traditional conference presentations than as a "workspace," Seafaring: an early medieval conference on the islands of the North Atlantic invites proposals that will engage participants in mini-tutorials, masterclasses, writing workshops, and learning laboratories - all of which are designed to widen their linguistic competence, interdisciplinary methods, geographic familiarity, and temporal scope, within and beyond the early medieval period.
This conference, “Seafaring:
an early medieval conference on the islands of the North Atlantic” came out
of a discussion Donna Beth and I had last year after a workshop on translation
theory, contemporary poetics, and Beowulf
that I ran with her very smart and pleasantly intimate Graduate seminar on Beowulf of Spring 2015. The workshop
produced a series of what we thought were really compelling and fresh readings
of particular scenes of Beowulf,
partially by forcing the study of Old English Poetry into conversation with
some other disciplinary economies (namely, more avant-garde 20th
century poetics).
We, and a lot of ITM readers, are trained in the study of
Old English—and wouldn’t trade that for anything. But we all know that the
world of Old English poetry is a) not only a world that takes place between
roughly 450 and 1100 CE (the very fact that this world extends into 21st
century classrooms alone suggests its longer and more complicated life), and b)
a world that is much larger—geographically, ethnically, racially, and
temporally—than the world summoned by the term “Anglo-Saxon.” Thinking through
this, along with Donna Beth’s own work on race and ethnicity in Old English
Studies, we worked through a number of ideas as to how to build more space for
the study of Early Medieval Britain that could at once reframe literary and
historical discussions outside the traditional disciplinary lines of
Nationalized Literatures and open those discussions to a wide variety
field-changing disciplines, from poetics to neuroscience. We think that what
we’ve put together will take some very concrete steps towards formalizing
spaces for disciplinary experimentation and de-nationalizing literary history
in early medieval Britain and across the North Atlantic.
We also think that for this to work, certain kinds of
workshop spaces need to be opened up: places to pick up new skills as much as
present new readings, spaces where scholars from a variety of disciplines can work
on some shared questions. So, we’re inviting proposals for seminars (intimate
groups that will focus on a shared text, question, topic) and proposals for
workshops or forums (focused on a particular skill, a philological crux,
etc).
We’ve decided to
extend the deadline for Seminar Proposals to January 10. Take a look at the
Conference Call here: [http://www.du.edu/ahss/english/news-events/seafaring-conference.html],
and consider carving out a few moments of the holidays to consider how you
might want to contribute.
Submit your seminar proposal
to SeafaringConference2016@gmail.com,
subject line: "Seminar Submission."
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